Affiliate Newsletter & Website Demo with LeadDyno

Writing an effective affiliate newsletter is easy – here’s how you can launch an effective affiliate program and keep your partners engaged using LeadDyno.

Affiliate Newsletter & Website Demo Transcript

This affiliate website is powered by LeadDyno. I’ve got this page customized so that I’ve got our logo in here, our colors, look and feel. Potential affiliates visit this page. This is where they’re can opt in, this is where they can join our program. And I’d give them auto access, which means I approve everyone and I give them immediate access to their affiliate dashboard so we can keep that momentum going so they can keep sharing from there. So this is our affiliate dashboard. This contains everything that each affiliate needs to promote our site and our product. So first thing we’ve got here is a unique referral link. So this is that classic affiliate link which we can copy and past and put anywhere. So this is the affiliate dashboard for Sam, he’s one of our partners, blogger in our industry. So Sam can copy and paste this link, he can put it on his own website, he can put it on his blog, he can put it on his social media channels. Sam will get credit for anyone who clicks through this link and ends up on our site.

So this actually dovetails to our first question. So in terms of customizing these links…so this is how basically Sam can customize his link. So as you can see, he’s got a vanity link here. This is going to pull from his affiliate code. We’ve got a setting where you can let affiliates change their own codes. So if you would like to enable that, you can do that and they can create their own vanity links. Or you can do that for them on the LeadDyno site. One alternative to this, also we do have link shorteners also. So if you want an even shorter link, kind of like a Bitly style, we have our own link shortener that you could alternatively enable as that affiliate link. So we’ve got a couple options there for you.

These links, as I mentioned, can be copied and pasted into social media. We also have some social media shortcuts. So to make life even easier for Sam, he can copy and paste this simply by clicking that Facebook button. Just one click is gonna log him into Facebook. It will tee up a Facebook post when Facebook eventually loads. This is a post I’ve got preloaded for him so he can just kind of click and go whether he’s from his computer. He can do the same thing on his phone. So instead of having to create a template from scratch, making things, again, really simple, really fast for our affiliates. With an initial click, he can post it out to his Facebook feed. His friends and followers will see this come through their respective Facebook feeds. And then as these folks click through, tap through, Sam will get credit for these shares.

Same idea on Twitter. So I’ve got a tweet here which he can then share on Twitter. Same goes for all our affiliates. So I’ve got it preloaded for them. So with an additional click, they can tweet this out. Our Twitter followers are then gonna see this come through their tweet streams and then again, as they click through, the affiliate who shared it will get credit for that share. We’ve got their progress underneath that social bar here. This is updating in real time. So again, in our affiliate’s case here, you can see he’s gotten a credit for sending us 1673 unique visitors. Out of these, 22 of these have opted in. Nine of these people have purchased our product. Thanks to these purchases, we’ve got some commissions owed here where we’ve got a certain percentage of the sale. And this is what we are assigning to our affiliates, in terms of commissions.

In your case, I would say a percentage commission on a purchase is going to be the most common thing that we’re gonna see. So that’s what I would maybe recommend starting with. If you need any guidance with setting up that percentage, let us know. In terms of what LeadDyno will support, we have a variety of commission plans. So you can nuance them to many degrees, if you would like. So we’ve got multi-level support available, per-product support is available for Shopify and BigCommerce folks. We can do recurring commissions for subscription products. So let us know what you’re thinking. Happy to help you set that up there as well.

All right. A couple more things on the dashboard and then we’ll get into the affiliate manager side of things. This is our marketing materials tab. This contains kind of things like infographic banner ads where we can…affiliates can get the HTML here. And then it has their affiliate link embedded so they’ll get credit for anyone who clicks through this banner and ends up on our website. So we’ve got all various shapes and sizes going on here.

Finally, I have an archive of affiliate newsletters. So when I send out an affiliate newsletter, this is going to go to each affiliate. It’s gonna land in their email inbox. They also get an archive here online. I’ll walk you through the creation of these newsletters and some best practices, again, when we get to the second half, which we’re about to dive into. From the affiliate standpoint, just know that when you send out a newsletter, they’re going to get it in their email inbox, so it’s a nice way to kind of engage with them. And then they do have access to these newsletters online here as well, going forward.

All right. Let’s get into LeadDyno itself, if I can figure out what tab I’ve got here. So this is going to be where we’ll set up the affiliate dashboard that I showed you in terms of the look and feel of it. So I’m going into the content section, which is about halfway down here on the left side. This is where we can choose which version of the dashboard that we want to go with. Whether it’s the mobile-friendly version, which I’m sure we probably want to go with. Get your color scheme going, get your logo in here. We’ve got some custom settings, which you can play around with. You can put the affiliate dashboard on your own domain if you would like, we do now have custom domain support.

Everything throughout the header, customizable as well. The introduction, also. So you can update the text down here. You can insert images and links, as well. So you can do more than just text. You can get to the HTML directly. If you want to style it, we’ve got custom CSS support, so you can even further style that if you would like. And if you want your affiliates to opt into a terms of service agreement, we do support that now as well. So this was a popular request, so this rolled out a few weeks ago. So terms of service available if you want to toss this in or toss in your own terms of service agreement and then have your affiliates okay this as they get into it.

The content section also has the specs for that Facebook post that I showed you earlier, the tweet that I showed you earlier. So if you’re wondering where that came from when I did the share on Facebook, this is populated from our content section and then our Facebook post. So again, a nice way to get our affiliates off to a head start where this is what they’re gonna share when they click those buttons. So we’re going to give these…we can kind of give the title of the post, give the content of it, give the URL that folks are clicking through, too. So we’re getting them off to a nice head start so they don’t have to sit there, thinking something from scratch. I know it’s pretty easy to write a tweet but I, in my experience, I find most affiliates like to kind of just click and go. And they will actually use your default content much more often than not. So you can really help them out here by getting them off to a nice head start.

Over to our tools menu. So I showed you the newsletter in the dashboard. So again, it’s gonna land in the inbox of the affiliates. You can write it from LeadDyno itself. In terms of tips and tricks for writing effective newsletters, I mean we want things that are gonna get our affiliate’s attention. So I always like to…one trick is to time it with the affiliate payments. That’s a nice way to let them know payments are going out the door, folks are getting paid. That inspires them to get back to their affiliate dashboard, check what they themselves might be getting paid. So that’s a nice way to, again, get them into that dashboard where they can do all that sharing from there. Also, if you have new products, new features, things that we’re gonna share with our own customers, I may give our affiliates the inside scoop on things to let them know, so that they can go out to social media, they can do their sharing. They’ve got kind of a unique thing that they’re taking out there and then on our end, we’re getting boosts from our affiliates, essentially a free PR team doing some work for us, in that respect as well.

We also have some automated emails. So these are going to fire off based on certain events. So for example, when a new affiliate signs up with us, we can send them a welcome email that looks something like this, which is gonna contain their affiliate link as well as the link to their affiliate dashboard. So everything they need to get up and running. In this case, I’m also doing a little review promo. So I’m letting them know that, hey, if you want to earn some quick money, just leave us a few reviews. I’ve found this to be an effective technique as well. So those of you who are looking for help on reviews, this is a nice way to get it organically from your base, also. So another kind of idea for you.

Also, on the automated email side, we can also send weekly updates. We can let the affiliates know every time they get credit for a new purchase. So again, just ways that we are engaging with them. These emails go out automatically from the system. So it’s nice, I don’t have to sit there, send these emails one at a time. These will just go out to folks and then, kind of, LeadDyno’s doing the engagement, kind of doing all that stuff, all of the heavy lifting there for me.

Okay, in terms of affiliate recruitment. So this will be our last big topic here. I know of popular ones because…on everyone’s mind, how do we get affiliates into our program? So I’ve got a few angles to share with you here. An affiliate invitation email is gonna go out to our new customers as they buy from this and then invite them to join our affiliate program. So this is a nice way to get us two for one. Or if you’ve got a new customer and what we’re looking to do is get a new affiliate here at the same time. In my experience, a nice way to grow your program organically. Been really successful for us, really successful for many of our customers. So I would to encourage you to consider this. And it is easy to set up, not much that you need to do other than go ahead and enable the email. And then this is gonna fire off from the system on your behalf. So it’s gonna reach out to folks and then invite them to join your affiliate program.

We also have an affiliate network. So this is probably especially exciting for those of you looking for affiliates and influencers in your product category. This is ecommerceaffiliates.com. So it’s our own network that is going to connect you up, again, with influencers who are interested in promoting product like yours on social media. This will take you through the setup process. In the network yourself, we let you reach out to prospective affiliates if you would like. So you can reach out directly to them, you’ll get access to affiliates here. You don’t have to necessarily if you don’t want to because we will do all of the legwork for you, where we’ve got a listing of our affiliate directory, where we’re gonna get you set up here with a profile featuring your product and especially featuring your affiliate program.

We do newsletters that go out to our affiliates. So let me actually go out to…let me see if I can get out to our Facebook page. We just posted a newsletter out earlier this morning. So that went out yesterday, so to kind of give you an idea of who these are going out to. So letting people know that hey, these are the types of products we got in our affiliate program. These are going out as emails to our affiliates and also through our social media channels as well. And then folks, if you’re featured in here, then folks can join with a single click and then they’ll get access to your program. So a nice way to get exposure to folks you may not otherwise currently have access to. And again, it’s a free benefit of joining LeadDyno. All you do is hit the network tab and this will get you logged in here and get you up and running.

And then the final thing that I’ve got for you, of course, is going to be payouts. So let me show you how to pay affiliates. When it’s time to pay affiliates, we’re going to just kind of hit the pay button. It’s pretty easy to do. We support Paypal. We support Paypal mass pay, so if you want to pay everyone at once, you can do that using Paypal mass pay. Individually, we’ve got Paypal buttons over on the right side. Coin Base, even. If you want to send Bitcoin out to people, we have an integration there. If you’re cutting a check, you can just mark somebody off as manually paid. And then you can pay for any time period that you want here as well. And I should mention that everything that you saw from the affiliate’s standpoint, and I’ll close with this, is available via our mobile app. So affiliates can get this app on their phone. They put in their email address, we’ll recognize they’re an affiliate of yours and then we connect them up with your program. So it’s a real nice way for you to connect up with your…get your affiliate program onto their phones here, as well.

All right, so I’m happy to get into questions now. So I’ve got a couple in here, so I’ll get to those. Let me show you how to get additional support as well. Phone, email, live chat available six. And actually, we’ve boosted it up to seven for the summer, so likely to stay at seven. Live chat in the lower right is a convenient way to get a hold of us within LeadDyno itself, which actually dovetails into our first question. Is support extra in terms of cost? And no, support’s included, so free support. It’s unlimited, so encourage you to take advantage of it. So again, phone, email, live chat, and available most of the day. We cover European hours, we cover U.S. hours, we cover Australian hours, so we’re good. We’re covering about 20 hours out of the day. So I would encourage you to take advantage of this. And again, available every day.

If you have questions for me, any of the emails you’ve got about this webinar will go back to me. My email address, brett@leaddyno.com, if you want to circle back with me on anything specific that you saw. Otherwise, I thank you for joining. Hoped it was helpful today. Stay in touch. Let us know how we can help with your affiliate program. And also, if you signed up for our network, let me know so I can make sure that we get you featured in one of those newsletters that I showed you going out to our affiliates. So let me know when you sign up and if you need help with your feature, we can help with that as well. Make it look as appealing as we can to the affiliates in our network. So everyone have a great rest of your Wednesday, great rest of your week. And again, if you think of anything, let me know.

I do have one more question coming in here. So can we…sorry, I’m gonna read this one. Can we customize specific products instead of an entire website? I assume what you mean is in terms of commissions. So yes, for Shopify and for BigCommerce accounts, we can do per product commission. So you can offer different commissions for different products. You can even link specifically to products. You can link to specific pages, so you can do that using our sub IDs. Let me actually show you. I might have an example there where I’m an affiliate. I’ve got my sub IDs here, so I have different links that are available here.

So an affiliate could create a link that goes to any product on your site and then create those links that go specifically there. And then again, for Shopify and BigCommerce, you can change up and have per product as well. Okay and then, someone’s question I may have missed in the beginning, separate way to have separate commissions based on each product? Yeah. So per product commissions available for Shopify and BigCommerce. Let’s see. Does the payment link work with a bank account number? No. That will not work with a bank account or automatic monthly payments. You’re gonna have to come in and still hit the pay button.

Videos that walk through the progress. We do. We have…let me send you our support page. So this is how you can kind of get through sort of that initial set up. I’ll send you this link here out to everyone. While I’m here, let me send you the per product commission link. Okay. Let’s see, what else? Does it work without a Shopify storefront? So it does. It is not compatible with Shopify buy button though. There is…unfortunately you won’t find a program that is because the buy button is kind of its own thing. But it’s compatible without Shopify, though. You can have a different store front. We have about 20 integrations, Shopify being one of them. So we work with WordPress, we do work with others, as well.

And then to answer your question on the mass payout option for commissions, yeah. That would be Paypal mass pay. So what you would do is just enable…contact Paypal, have them enable mass pay for your account. You can then pay all your affiliates at once using mass pay. How do we set up vanity links or short links? So what I showed you on the dashboard is this vanity link here. So if you let affiliates change their code, they could then set that up. I could set up a vanity code for an affiliate. So if I go to an affiliate–and I’m going to this person and then I’m going to edit it–I can change their affiliate code, the affiliate code is right here. So if I change that, that is going to set up a vanity code for them. For link shorteners, that is going to be under affiliate settings and then shorten affiliate link. So you go to edit settings and then this is going to be for link shorteners here.

Best practices on setting up commissions in terms of how to structure. Yeah, I can advise on a specific industry if you have a question. What I would encourage you to do is look at our affiliate network. And then this is also sorted by…ranked by affiliate programs, with the top affiliate programs at the top. So that will let you know, in a given industry, what types of setups are the most compelling. In general, percentage on a purchase can be a good way to go. I always tell people go with whatever percentage you would be comfortable paying somebody on an advertising sense. So if you’re spending money with Google Adwords, if you’re spending money with Facebook, you could then maybe just spend that money with an affiliate. That’s what we do. So we’ve got a certain percentage that we’re comfortable with, 30% in our case. If I spent that at Adwords, I would be happy. We give that to our affiliates. But again, if you have questions on your specific products or industry, let me know.

And then do we send folks a code when they sign up? So yeah. They will get the welcome email, which is back here. So when affiliates sign up, they will get a welcome email, which contains their affiliate link as well as the link to their dashboard. So everything that they need. If you want to do an affiliate code, you could put that in here as well. So that’s just gonna be this guy here.

Okay, so it looks like we are through the questions. So let us know if there is anything else. I will leave you with our support info, wherever that is. See if I can get back to that. I’ll leave you with our contact page. So again, let us know if you have questions. Thanks for all of your questions. One more question on the code. Can I set up a discount? You can. You’re going to set up the discount though in your shopping cart. So if you’re on Shopify, if you’re on BigCommerce or wherever you are, you will set up a discount on that end. We’ll pull in the discount if it’s you. So if it’s Shopify or BigCommerce, we’ll pull in the discount. We’ll pull in the code. We’re not going to apply the discount, though, because we don’t…all we do is collect information from the shopping cart. We don’t send any information to it. So if you want to set up a discount, we can match it up, but that’s going to be on the shopping cart.

Okay, so again, thanks for joining. And then, what do I mean by pull it in? So I mean if somebody uses Sam’s code…so let me go back to Sam…Sam’s code is lawyerist. So if somebody uses a discount code, lawyerist, we’ll match it up and we’ll say this person…and we’ll know this person came from Sam. So we’re able to match it up, even if the link here was not used. So that’s how we’ll get the discount code and then we can match it up, potentially, with an affiliate code if you’re looking to do things like that. All right, so it looks like we are now good. So I will now let everyone go and have a great rest of your Wednesday. Thanks for all the questions and a great rest of your week. And again, any follow-up, let me know.